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Friday, May 27, 2016

Why This Is Not An IPPG Moment

Kenya today finds itself in the throes of a
crisis. In the run up to next year’s scheduled general election, weekly opposition
protests and the subsequent brutal crackdown, have deeply polarized the country
and left at least three people dead and many others, including police officers,
wounded. Though now suspended, a threat to restart the demonstrations if dialogue
doesn’t happen still hangs in the air. But beyond the rhetoric, the teargas and
the scenes of bloody confrontation, this is above all a crisis of memory and
imagination.

We have been here before. Almost every election in the multiparty era
has been preceded by protests and demands for reform. The contestation has
mainly been about two questions: the rules governing elections; and who sets
and administers them. The latter question is the immediate spark for the
current weekly demonstrations with demands for the reconstitution of the
Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. However, in the background,
and sadly barely mentioned, lurks the even more critical issue of wider reforms
to the electoral system.

Nearly two decades ago, as the country prepared
for another election, near identical scenes of protest over the composition of
the then Electoral Commission of Kenya elicited a vicious response from the
Nyayo government led to the deaths of 13 protesters on Saba Saba day in 1997
and the formation of the Inter Parties Parliamentary Group which negotiated a
raft of reforms. These allowed the country to proceed to the polls later that
year.

In our collective memory, the IPPG process
was as a seminal moment during which the autocratic President Daniel Arap Moi
was forced to accede to the people’s demand for change. George Kegoro, in March
described
it as “an elite platform that Kenyan political actors and civil society crafted
in 1997 to save the country from the disaster that might have resulted from a
threatened opposition boycott of the General Election of that year”.

There are
many parallels with today’s impasse including the threat by the opposition
Coalition for Reforms and Democracy to boycott the 2017 elections if the IEBC
is not replaced. Given that, many are citing the IPPG as a model for resolution.
“It is time for another IPPG-like moment in Kenya,” as Mr Kegoro presciently
wrote. The insistence by the governing Jubilee coalition and its supporters
that Parliament is the appropriate forum for resolving the dispute can also be
seen in this light.

However, this telling ignores a few
inconvenient facts of history. The IPPG was not crafted by the opposition ad
civil society to save Kenya. On the contrary, it was, as Rok Ajulu described
in the New England Journal of Public Policy, “a KANU platform … designed to
blunt the impact of the reform agenda of the opposition and its allies in the
National Convention Executive Council [the civil society coalition that had
spearheaded demands for change].” The NCEC correctly saw the IPPG as a tool “to
cool the fire raised by the … the demands of the country for electoral reform,
and in the process to legitimise the Moi re-election machine," and opposed
it.

While the IPPG achieved some reforms,
including allowing the opposition a role in appointing ECK commissioners, it
was ultimately betrayed and many of the negotiated reforms were not enacted
into law following the early dissolution of Parliament. Moi’s successor as
President, Mwai Kibaki, would a decade later rubbish the very agreement he had
had a hand in negotiating as a non-binding “gentleman’s agreement” and ignore
it when appointing ECK commissioners, fatally undermining the ECK’s credibility
and setting the country on the path to the 2008 post-election crisis.

Many of the arguments we hear from
government types today in favour of a Parliamentary process are a rehash of
Moi’s justification for using Parliament, the “legitimate representative of the
people” as a means to exclude the citizenry. They highlight the question at the heart of
the push for constitutional transformation which, despite the 2010
constitution, we have failed to resolve: Is reform to be a people-driven or
state-driven process?

This
is evident in the continuing delegitimization of the street as a proper avenue
for political participation and the idea that state institutions are the only acceptable
forums for political negotiations. We see it when Boniface Mwangi’s peaceful
demonstrations are violently dispersed and hear it when the government attempts
to arrogate
to itself the power to determine where and when protests can happen.

It is this collective failure to imagine
alternative spaces where national questions can be debated and resolved by
inclusive collections of wananchi, and not just by politicians or public
officials, that is at the root of many of the state’s current legitimacy problems.
Sadly, our political processes continue to be more concerned with solving the
problems of politicians rather than those of the people.

Going forward, we must insist that any
talks on fixing the electoral system not be sequestered in Parliament or
participation limited to politicians. This is Kenya’s problem, not Raila Odinga’s
or Uhuru Kenyatta’s. We must demand an inclusive national dialogue involving a
wide array of stakeholders, including organized civil society and academics.
These groups were major drivers for the 1997 “No Reforms, No Election” movement
that was locked out of Moi’s IPPG talks. It is time they helped us finish what
they started.

3 comments:

Very eloquent, very thorough as always @gathara but finish what? To where?

You have the intellectual tools to look far back but you refuse to apply them to look far down the road.

Marshall McLuhan is famous for having said that "what people don't realise is, when driving and you are looking in to the rear view mirror you are actually looking in to the future..." your article @gathara is accurate prophecy.

...and I don't know if you are watching events across the Atlantic, I know you have the wherewithal to know...

..."things fall apart" @gathara... right before our very eyes, things are all falling apart..